honestly

now:

Under a red sky, I told her, "I want to die." And how I cry with no concrete reason why and have bad dreams every night, or every other night. I feel sickly, like I am lost at sea. And all the girls I used to know are high on ecstasy, and they're much happier than me, I think. She told me things would pass, like the girls who smoke the grass, like huffing gas out in the dried-up meadow grass under stars that shine like glass in the sun. And she said, "Would you shoot me in the head?" We shot the breeze and had malt liquor instead. Passed out together in the shed or the bed - I don't recall. I said: "What better way to put myself in my place? What better way to get out of this goddamn place? Sometimes I feel like I'm stuck in this fucking place. What better way to put myself in my place?" She said: "Broken hearts are easy to hide. Broken hearts are easy to ignore. See, when you break your heart, nothing really breaks. Look at me, and look at you: 18, and dead - At 16 you were almost dead. Just sleep with me in my bed, and don't say those things you said."

please:

The sun is shining on me, finally. Finally. And you walk so gracefully. Why don't you walk with me? Things are turning green and changing, and it smells sweet. Birds have come from out at sea, and they sing for you and me. Time here is always so slow, but summer's fast. Let's make it last. Maybe this year you could stay, and we'll wake together every day. Sometimes it gets so lonely up here on the top of the world.

why did i never care about this band until now?

mean reds.

-------

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen to-morrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind." There was a long silence.

"I claim them all," said the Savage at last.

WISHBONE

You saved my life he says I owe you everything.
You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just get gone, but he’s

relentless,

keeps saying I owe you, says Your shoes are filling with your own damn blood,
you must want something, just tell me, and it’s yours.
But I can’t look at him, can hardly speak,

I took the bullet for all the wrong reasons, I’d just as soon kill you myself, I say.
You keep saying I owe you, I owe… but you say the same thing every time.
Let’s not talk about it, let’s just not talk.

Not because I don’t believe it, not because I want it any different, but I’m always saving
and you’re always owing and I’m tired of asking to settle the debt.

Don’t bother.

You never mean it anyway, not really, and it only makes me that much more ashamed.
There’s only one thing I want, don’t make me say it, just get me bandages, I’m bleeding,
I’m not just making conversation.

There’s smashed glass glittering everywhere like stars. It’s a Western, Henry,

it’s a downright shoot-em-up. We’ve made a graveyard out of the bone white afternoon.
It’s another wrong-man-dies scenario

and we keep doing it, Henry, keep saying until we get it right…
but we always win and we never quit, see, we’ve won again, here we are at the place
where I get to beg for it

where I get to say Please, for just one night, will you lay down next to me, we can leave our
clothes on, we can stay all buttoned up?
or will I say

Roll over and let me fuck you till you puke, Henry, you owe me this much, you can indulge me
this at least, can’t you? but we both know how it goes. I say I want you inside me

and you hold my head underwater, I say I want you inside me

and you split me open with a knife. I’m battling monsters, half-monkey, half-tarantula,
I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings and you say I’ll give you anything.
But you never come through.

Give me bullet power. Give me power over angels. Even when you’re standing up
you look like you’re lying down, but will you let me kiss your neck, baby? Do I have to
tie your arms down?

Do I have to stick my tongue in your mouth like the hand of a thief, like a burglary
like it’s just another petty theft? It makes me tired, Henry. Do you see what I mean?
Do you see what I’m getting at?

You swallowing matches and suddenly I’m yelling Strike me. Strike anywhere.
I swear, I end up feeling empty, like you’ve taken something out of me, and I have to search
my body for the scars, thinking

Did he find that one last tender place to sink his teeth in? I know you want me to say it, Henry,
it’s in the script, you want me to say Lie down on the bed, you’re all I ever wanted

and worth dying for too


but I think I’d rather keep the bullet this time. It’s mine, you can’t have it, see,
I’m not giving it up. This way you still owe me, and that’s
as good as anything.

You can’t get out of this one, Henry, you can’t get it out of me, and with this bullet

lodged in my chest, covered with your name, I will turn myself into a gun, because
it’s all I have,

because I’m hungry and hollow and just want something to call my own. I’ll be your
slaughterhouse, your killing floor, your morgue and final resting, walking around with this
bullet inside me

‘cause I couldn’t make you love me and I’m tired of pulling your teeth. Don’t you see, it’s like

I’ve swallowed your house keys, and it feels so natural, like the bullet was already there,
like it’s been waiting inside me the whole time.

Do you want it? Do you want anything I have? Will you throw me to the ground
like you mean it, reach inside and wrestle it out with your bare hands?
If you love me, Henry, you don’t love me in a way I understand.

Do you know how it ends? Do you feel lucky? Do you want to go home now?

There’s a bottle of whiskey in the trunk of the Chevy and a dead man at our feet
staring up at us like we’re something interesting.

This is where the evening splits in half, Henry, love or death. Grab an end, pull hard,
and make a wish.

Richard Siken


----------------------

I am going to fail.
I'm going to fail cartilage and plastic, camera and arrow.
I'm going to fail binoculars and conjugations,
all the accompanying musics: I am failing,
I must fail, I can fail, I have failed
the way some women throw themselves
into lover's arms or out trains,
fingers crossed and skirts billowing
behind them. I'm going to fail
the way strawberry plants fail,
have dug down hard to fail, shooting
brown runners out into silt, into dry gray beds,
into tissue and rock. I'm going to fail
the way their several hundred hearts below surface
have failed, thick, soft stumps desiccating
to tumors; the way roots wizen in the cold
and cloud black, knotty as spark plugs, cystic
synapses. I'm going to fail light and stars and tears.
I'm going to fail the way cowards only wish they could fail,
the way the brave refuse to fail or the vain fear to,
believing that to stray even once from perfection
is to be permanently cast out, Wandering Jew
of failure, Adam of failure, Sita of failure; that's the way
I'm going to fail, bud and creosote and cloud.
I'm failing pet and parent. I'm failing the food
in strangers' stomachs, the slender inchoate rings
of distant planets. I'm going to fail these words
and the next and the next. I'm going to fail them,
I'm going to fail her-- trust me, I've already failed him--
and the possibility of a we is going to sink me
like a bad boat. I'm going to fail the way
this strawberry plant has failed, alive without bud,
without fruit, without tenderness, hugging itself
to privation and ridiculous want.
I'm going to fail simply by standing in front of you,
waving my arms in your face as if hailing a taxi:
I'm here, I'm here, please don't forget me,
though you already have, I smell it, even cloaked
with soil, sending out my slender fingers for you,
sending out all my hair and tongue and brain.
I'm going to fail you
just as you're going to fail me,
urging yourself further down to sediment
and the tiny, trickling filaments of damp;
thirsty, thirsty, desperate to drown
if even for a little while, if even for once:
to succumb, to be destroyed,
to die completely, to fail the way I've failed
in every particular sense of myself,
in every new and beautiful light.

-----

every time i look for you..

I am made of circles. You are made of lines. You exuding arrows, me revealing spines.

“I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world.”
— Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

if you're reading this, gtfo my lj